Saturday Afternoon Cigar

There is no better way to kill the two hours before the Ohio State v. USC game than to smoke a Rocky Patel Sun Grown and read some commie history.

We're only half way through Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, a book about Stalin's purges.

Stalin's purges led to about a million killed, and many more suffering in work and re-education camps. But like all liberal progressive communist programs, it cost far more than was expected.

One example is the analysis of others that Conquest discusses. Most work camps, while 'free' in concept to Stalin, actually cost more than they produced when one considers the capture and transportation of the prisoners, housing, supples, etc. And, at a loss to Stalin's (and every commie's) most prized asset, the army. It is estimated that 250,000 soldiers were pulled from outward-facing duties to support the transportation, prison and execution operations.

Here's another example of how these people can't be trusted to bring a project in on time, or under budget. From pate 287:

The cellars of the Lubyanka were really a sort of basement divided into a number of rooms off corridors. Later on, in ordinary routine, the condemned handed in their clothes in one of these rooms and changed into white underclothes only. They were taken to the death cell and shot in the back of the neck with a TT eight-shot automatic. A doctor then signed the death certificate, the last document to be put in their files, and the tarpaulin on the floor was taken away to be cleaned by a woman specially employed for that purpose. (Execution with a small-bore pistol is not, as might seem, very humane. Of the 9,432 corpses exhumed at Vinnitsa, 6,360 had needed a second shot; 78, a third shot; and 2, a fourth shot, while many others had been struck over the head with a blunt object to finish them off. Again, we are told in a recent Soviet article that in the mass graves at Kuropaty the sand thrown above a new batch of those executed could still be seen moving some time later.)

That is a 68.3% cost over-run.

We expect similar overages with Obama's heath care 'reform'. We further expect a book to report the results of his 'reform', in the same vein as Conquest's, in some future date.

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